


The call of the void

by clement1ne



Category: Disco Elysium (Video Game)
Genre: Alcohol Withdrawal, Drug Addiction, Emotional Healing, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Harry is a mess, Harry pov, Healing, Hurt/Comfort, Implied/Referenced Drug Addiction, M/M, Not Beta Read, Past Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Past Drug Addiction, Past Drug Use, Poor Man, Slow Burn, harry is also going through shit, harry rebuilds his life, im going through some shit so this fic is me coping, like snapshots of his recovery process, moves past his past, no beta we die like men, not super linear, not written in the style of the game cus i simply cannot lmao
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-08-10
Updated: 2020-08-26
Packaged: 2021-03-05 23:54:33
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 12,926
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25813876
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/clement1ne/pseuds/clement1ne
Summary: Ever since The Case had drawn to its conclusion, you had been left in some kind of limbo. The weight of your situation hit you all at once, along with the responsibility of fixing the trail of destruction your previous body had left behind. You cannot shirk your past. It sticks to you like napalm. (set after the game, snapshots of Harry's progress as he learns to grow and change and recovers slowly with the help of the beloved Lieutenant. Mostly pre written, will hopefully be updating once a week unless my motivation dies lmao.)
Relationships: Harry Du Bois & Kim Kitsuragi, Harry Du Bois/Kim Kitsuragi
Comments: 28
Kudos: 52





	1. ???

**Author's Note:**

> yoooooooo this fic was birthed in the early hours of the morning, i don't really know what im doing and i haven't written for ages but sometimes u need to write about an ex-alcoholic, ex-drug addicted old man to cope with the crushing realisation of life. tbh this could be posted as a oneshot as it doesn't really directly lead into anything (it takes place somewhere between the first proper chapter and the second) but its here now and i guess its just an introduction to my writing style and the kind of vibe im going for here. idk. constructive criticism is welcome !

Everyone has their problems, Harry baby. In this tangle of a world, all synapses firing messily in a semblance of primitive composure – no one is really as straight-laced as they seem. Everyone you walk past on these dull, grey streets has something festering beneath their skin sack. 

It’s in the bloodshot eyes of the girl behind the counter at the store - how she didn’t sleep because her mind was too busy throwing itself at the inside of her skull until it was a pulp of emotions and loud, loud thoughts, hand grasping at the fat of her stomach as she curled into herself and let out another cry to a world that wouldn’t listen. 

The old man, perched on a decaying bench, finding friends among the birds that eat the seed from the same hand a lost love once held. 

It’s in the jittering twelve-year-old, pupils blown and arms scarred with restlessness, curses and bitter drugs on the tip of his tongue, the exhausted cafeteria manager, young, but skin sullen and dragged with the exhaustion of work and so much trying, the old war veteran, the distant disco girl, the lost cryptozoologist, the countless bodies sat by the sea’s edge rotting in the briny air. 

The composed RCM Lieutenant. 

Everything. 

Even the world itself, self-destructive and languidly eager to throw everything within it under a blanket of thick, heavy destruction.

But you have a special kind of rot lurking in you don’t you, boy? You stood at the edge of the proverbial Pale and threw yourself in headfirst. To make yourself feel better or to destroy what little of yourself remained? Or both? Your vices ate away at the grey of your brain like fat, slimy maggots. You became the fat, slimy maggot yourself. 

Sometimes you think you should have never awoken from your toe against the edge of death. If you had died with drugs in your veins, smoke in your lungs and vomit slick in the twines of your moustache, at least it would have been on your terms. No control over your life, so you control in death. 

But you’re not. Although, on nights like tonight - alone in your apartment, body sweat-damp with the heat of shame and these nasty, nasty little thoughts flying around your brain like carnivorous flies - you wish you were. It’s clean here, (now anyway, after the last week of limping and concussed cleaning from you and the gracious lieutenant - who poured alcohol from hot fermenting bottles and disposed of bags and boxes of powder and pills as your fingers twitched and he pretended not to notice), but that big gelatinous hippocampus is reminding you what was here. What it feels like should be here. The pills in your bedside table, the bottle of whiskey under your bed frame. 

The walls seem to leech that destructive apricot scent. 

Oh, you thought you were done with her? Not a chance, baby. Your gap in memories may have partially cleaned your plate but she still sits on the rim of your mind, kicking her feet in the juices of your brain and sending ripples through your whole system. You’re pushing your thoughts around the plate, trying to get things together to fit, but there she is and the scent of apricot fills your lungs. You drop the fork against the porcelain of your skull, the shrill rattle a testament to your failure. You reach out to grab it once more and a gloved hand reaches out in tandem, almost glowing in the bleak backdrop of your sodden mind - a guiding light. 

Oh well well, what is that? 

With that raspy condescending voice in your ears, you awaken to the soft light of dawn through your window. For a moment you question its reality, the gentleness of the light jarring beside the jagged points of your thoughts. 

You unstick your cheek from your pillow, feeling the scores in your skin left by the crumpled fabric and the rough lines of salt dried skin. You’d been crying more since your return to this place. Sore eyes struggle to find the clock on your bedside table, the numbers taking a few moments to settle into focus. You still half expect them to merge into each other, a result of your still dreaming mind, but no such luck. 7 am, almost exactly. You might have melted your organs with drink and drugs but at least your internal clock is still somewhat reliable. 

A quiet voice pipes up in the pit of your thoughts to offer up a, “You’re welcome.” 

You swing your legs off the side of your bed, fresh and made but still feeling a bit like your nest at the Whirling, feet settling on the cool, warped wooden floor. You shut your eyes for the briefest of moments, wishing you could fall back into the tangle of covers and be sucked back into the abyss of sleep, but you recite Kim's words in your head, a gentle and calculated thing compared the raspy, acrid tone that was once there. 

“It is important to instil routine.” 

The words slip from your mouth as you stand and make your way to the bathroom.


	2. Want To Be Free

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Harry and Kim clean out a room.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> the yearning is strong with this one, lads. also lets play a game called spot the forced car metaphor lmao

The day you came back was the worst. After your brain had crawled back into consciousness, you were reintroduced to the world (like the drunken child you are) through the lens of The Case. Leaving it behind felt like leaving part of yourself, bubbling and rotting, cradled in the arms of Lely as he decayed and faded into the backseat of your brain - clouded whispers of the Pale and internalised conversations. 

You eventually managed to find the address to your home. The name leaves a foul taste in your mouth, like rotting fruit and cheap beer. Something in your body is crying out to you not to go – like lead in your veins and a vice grip around your dimming lungs. Your nostrils flare and the beet red of your vein busted cheeks reaches your eyes.  


You don’t want to go back there, Harry boy. You can’t say what you’ll find but... You know. Deep in the roiling acid of your stomach, you know. You can’t really remember your apartment, but the scenes of your sorrow play out in the theatre of your mind, clear as day. 

_Another night, lost. It’s not cold, but the air bites at your skin - hungry little flies burrowing into your pores and laying stinking fat eggs, ready to burst open again tomorrow. Teeth grind and chatter against the non-existent cold, blunt fingernails raking the thinning skin of your arms. You can’t sleep, you can never sleep, no matter how bloated you are with alcohol, and your body rolls off the waves of your sheets like some inflated, rotting whale. The bags under your eyes threaten to drown you. You are ugly. This place is ugly. You curl up in the dumpster that is your home to rot among the trash like the rodent you are._

You were sure the Lieutenant would leave you after The Case. The voices in your mind thrashed and screamed, demanding to be listened to and to spare yourself the pain of his inevitable and quickly approaching departure, but he did not leave. He submitted the paperwork to be transferred to your Precinct, a flash of glasses and a short, calculated smile. 

His handwriting is careful and neat. You wouldn't have expected anything else.

He was beside you when you learned of your address. And he is beside you as you stand in front of the door – paint peeling off in long, curled strands like ugly, twisted fingers beckoning you forwards. You’re sure they’re moving to curl around your neck. This place wants you to suffer. The windows on the door glint, almost as if they are looking towards Kim, a silent judgement of you and your choices. “Are you sure you want him to see this?”, you can hear it ask in its lamenting creaks and groans. Your joints do the same as you turn to look at him. 

He is standing behind you, hands clasped behind his back, perfectly calm and composed. You don’t have to ask to know he is steeling himself. He is fully aware of what will lay behind your door. The light in the hallway catches the soft wisps of his hair, glowing in a pulsating aura around his head. 

You are about to bring an angel into this hellish domain. A snake with a sorrowful grip and crying eyes. 

“Detective?” His careful voice cuts through your thoughts like a hot knife, smelling sweet as it burns through. Like chestnut.  
“I’m here.” The statement is obvious, but it carries a weight that threatens to collapse your smoke-stained lungs.  


He won’t tell you it’s okay – he knows it's not, and won’t be for a long time – but he is here. The baggage of empty bottles won't be as hard to drag with two pairs of hands. He peers at you through his glasses. You breathe deeply, your chest straining as you feel like you can't get enough oxygen, and offer a weak smile that doesn’t quite reach your eyes.  


“Thank you.” 

He doesn’t have to be here, but he is. 

With a tremor, you reach for your keys, the metal warm where it’s been sat in your pocket against your sweating thigh and feeling like a knife in your hands. You stab the lock and twist, the door laughing as you open it. 

The smell hits you immediately and it makes you flinch. If you weren’t stood right here, you’d think you died in there. 

Well. In a way, you had. 

You level your shoulders, body tense and muscles taut as you withstand the onslaught of foul odours emanating from your hovel. The word ‘home’ doesn’t sit right in your mind – a home is supposed to be comfortable, personal, quintessentially yours. This is none of those things. It feels like you’re walking into a graveyard, bottles and boxes the gravestones, the spirits of spirit haunting the space. You gulp, thick and heavy. The smell of the air sits in your stomach as if you had licked the ground. 

With every bursting nerve in your body telling you not to, you turn to look at Kim. The hallway light behind him flickers. You fail to read his expression in its entirety, but you know this man. His hands come around from behind his back, the crinkling of a plastic bag and cleaning supplies sounding defiantly against the humming stench of the room beyond. The light catches on the lenses of his glasses and it seems to pulsate across his face before he steps forward, crossing the border into the first circle of hell. 

This man has been an officer for 19 years, he has seen worse. You try not to think about that too hard. 

“We won’t be able to get much done today, but we can make a start.” He begins, carefully, as if tip-toeing across a freshly frozen lake. He then pauses for the briefest of moments before turning to you, a painfully earnest expression on his face.  
“We’ll make sure there is somewhere clean and safe for you to sleep, at the very least.” 

Your chest aches as he says that. 

Your sorrowful, gelatinous brain quivers in its shell. It feels like pins and needles, numbing the flesh of your insides. Since the moment you woke in the Whirling-in-rags, it was a battle against yourself. You were sure you had lost, countless times, an uncountable amount of times, and you were sure you were on the precipice of losing again. Losing yourself, losing everything around you. You had so much to amend, to apologise for. You apologise to the universe for existing. You apologise to Kim for your actions, your words, for him having to be your partner, and a heavy guilt twists in your gut and compels you to apologise now. For him having to be here in the hot smell of the decaying corpse of your apartment - to settle the pan down and brush you inside with a broom, like dog shit at the side of the road. 

“Kim, I’m sor-”  


With a swift hand gesture, he silences you. Your eyes trail downwards like a scolded mutt – an unspoken apology. He fixes his glasses.  


“Harry,” the familiarity of the name sends a jolt down your spine “, I volunteered to be here. I want to help.”  


The conviction in the word ‘want’ settles the angry, unsure whispers in your brain. He wants to be here. He stepped across the threshold before you, he holds the cleaning supplies, he said ‘we.’ You close your eyes for a moment, letting the cool syllable of the word wash over you like briny sea air before you nod.  


"Okay.”  
Kim offers you a smile. 

You pick your way around the corpses of trash on the ground, victims of a revolution in your own space. The room is dark, almost heavy with it, suffocating. The walls are dingy, grimy, and sweaty like your skin. You kick over a mound of letters with the toe of your shoe, spreading across the ground like playing cards, showing your mess of a hand to the world. You sigh. A plant sits on the table by the door, brown and dry. 

You murdered it. 

An inexplicable bubble of sadness overwhelms you and you look away before the bubble bursts and you start crying over a dead plant. A phone sits beside it, a light flashing, alerting you to voice messages. 

An alarm. It’s an alarm, flashing red and dangerous – if you press play, there will be no turning back. You cannot unhear what you hear unless, of course, you drag your body through the heavy sludge of another drink and drug-induced coma. 

Your finger twitches as you subconsciously raise your hand. Quickly, Kim brushes past your fingers and presses the delete button. The contact alerts you to your moving limbs. With a quick glance back to you, he ventures further into the tangled mess. You silently thank him. 

The place is small – you walk from the hallway directly into your living room that shares its space with a fetid kitchen. There is a darkened hallway to the right and you can only assume that’s where the bathroom and your rat nest of a bedroom are. 

The floor is wooden, warped, and sticky. The soles of your shoes crunch against dropped pills, dried and forgotten food, clanking against plates discarded on the ground and wading through dirty stinking clothes like wading through a swamp. After a bit, the smell becomes more bearable, but the rotting stench still punches through to your lungs like a bare-knuckle boxer, burying its fist among the soft flesh of your gut. Despite the obvious squalor, there are also a lot of personal effects, lending itself more comfortably to the moniker of ‘home.’ Each thing sends a jolt of phantom pain through your heart – a deep, uncomfortable sense of loss. 

There are pictures on the walls – old, sun-bleached scenes of places you’ve been, but haven’t been. There’s a bookcase, pressed flat against the wall - filled with books with wavy pages. On one shelf, there are shells, a ribbon, stones and an old, broken microphone. Then, a flash of blonde. You shield your eyes as if you’re looking directly into the sun. In your peripheral, you can see Kim watching you carefully, assessing your crime scene of a life. 

No - he’s concerned. He’s watching to make sure you’re okay. You walk away from the shrine to inspect the rest of the damage. He looks pleased. 

You pick over the mess of old newspapers, mugs, takeaway containers and the powder-filled bags that seem to vibrate as your fingers hover over them – something in your body seems to answer. Some loud, eager part of yourself makes your cells vibrate in response. You are pulled violently from your thoughts as Kim sets the bag of cleaning supplies down on a rare spot of clear ground. 

“We should get started.” He says and turns to you. You quickly straighten and make a concerted effort to ignore the objects on the table. “We should make sure the bedroom is clear, first of all. You start there, I’ll clear out this room and the bathroom of any paraphernalia.” 

He doesn’t skirt around it. You appreciate that. With a firm nod, you make your way to the supplies, retrieving a trash bag and some gloves. An uncomfortable thought of what could spear you amongst the dark recesses of your room flashes in your mind.  


“And Harry,” your name, again. He fixes you with an intense look. “, if you need me, I'm just in here.”  


Once again, you give that weak smile, drawing on the waning power of ‘The Expression’, before you turn to leave. You wonder to yourself why he is letting you into the bedroom alone when, almost certainly, there are demons in bottles and bags and blister packs.  


He knows this is a sacred place for you. The core of your small, crumbling church, so he lets you leave and make your peace before he comes in to discard the rotting offerings. 

Suddenly, some primitive part of your brain cries out and your mouth becomes dry and your saliva thick. It’s there again, that prowling uncertain fear, crouching at the back of your mind, shrouded by the blanket of your amnesia. You blink a few times and raise your arm. It's laborious, as if something is trying to push it back down. You could give up, go back to the living room and lay as waste among your waste and cry to Kim about how your bedroom is a site of misery and you can never go in there. Something in you cracks and shines golden as it fills, and you grab the door handle and push. 

You breathe in hard and deep, your lungs suffocating under the heavy smell of crushing familiarity. There is a sweetness in the air, a sweetness you know all too well and it curls in your stomach like a worm, making you nauseous. You swallow thickly. With an unsure step, you enter the room and you can feel Kim’s attention on you. 

The room is a fetid pit of despair. The atmosphere seems to kill all light that enters. Everything is dark and indiscernible. You contemplate turning the light on but decide you would not like to see what lies within in any kind of detail. There’s an electricity in the air and it prickles all over, your body responding in kind with goose-bumps flushing your clammy skin. You _know_ where everything is. You can _feel_ it. There’s a half-empty bottle of whiskey under your bed, there’s a bag of powder in your beside table beside a blister back of tablets, an opened can of cheap beer on top and a full can at its feet, you can hear the rattling of pills in a bottle to the right, the sloshing of liquid against glass to your left, the crinkling of plastic at your feet, the sick, gurgling sound of your stomach and an apricot scent wafting from beneath the pillow on the left-hand side of the bed. 

Your mind seems to reel off the list in a twisted kind of excitement, testing you, pushing you to concede and drop to your knees like a starving dog and scrabble in your filth for sustenance in the form of manufactured happiness. You feel your joints tremble as they threaten to cave in to the rot inside. You think about dropping like a swatted fly, crying out for Kim as if someone has their hands around your throat. 

Well, someone does, but they’re not here anymore. 

With all the effort of prying off vice-like hands, you steel yourself and take another step forward, guided by your nose to the left side of the bed. This will probably destroy you in the same way as the drink and drugs, but at least it will only be your emotions that lay beneath the guillotine. You lick your lips and reach out towards the pillow, the fabric calling to you in a soft sickly-sweet female voice. With sweat on your palms, you flip the pillow over. The smell that was once gentle wafting about your nose shoots up like a cold metal rod, scrambling your brains and ripping them out. Tears prickle the corners of your eyes as you see a picture of the woman herself. It was unavoidable. You felt her there, you didn’t know how, and as soon as you whipped the pillow back, your eyes instinctively found the small photo. 

_Knees pulled to your chest like a toddler, you clutch the photo in a shivering hand, the other grasping the neck of the bottle as if it’s a buoy and you’re about to go under. You can barely see her face through the hot salty tears, but you can feel her glowing presence – ethereal and beautiful and punching you right in the heart._

After a moment, you slam the pillow back down. The effort of the action burns your muscles. You’ve been here scarcely half an hour but time feels indiscernible – like your floating through the black limbo of your mind once more. You try to collect yourself, but you hurry to the door a bit more desperately than you would have liked. You leave the room stuck in a miserable stasis and close the door. 

The clanging and crinkling of various things being thrown into a bag stops abruptly as Kim notices your presence. He tries not to hurry to your side, but you notice the urgency.  


“Detective?” He starts, gentle fingers resting against your forearm. It grounds you.  


“There’s uh... There’s a lot of stuff in there.” You say, not explaining further. You don’t want to. You don’t have to. Kim notices the prickle of tears in your eyes and the panicked sheen of sweat on your forehead and he understands. He can't smell the apricot but he knows it's there.  


“I’ll take care of it,” he says quickly as he walks back to grab the bag once more. “, but I want you to come back in there with me when I’m done.” He asserts, fixing you with another intense look that squeezes the air from your lungs. Wordlessly, you nod.  


Despite the distinct lack of light in the room, you swear you can see the wisps of a halo about his head.  


He is guiding you, not pushing you, but not making this easy for you either. Recovery will not be easy. Is not easy. And he knows it will not help you if he simply clears a path for you to skate through.  


“Under the left pillow, there’s...” You pause, stretching your fingers. “Could you throw that away, too. Please?” There’s a ghost of a smile and something like pride flashes across his face. You’re trying to move on from the creature you were. You’re attempting to fix your heart-break, instead of wallowing in its blood. With a small nod of his own, he disappears into the shadows of your room. 

Beyond that moment, things become a bit easier. Kim hasn’t finished picking through the piles of trash in this room, but _l'appel du vide_ isn’t as strong in here. Less steeped in sorrow. You toe about the piles, seeing them more as things and less as rotting vestiges of yourself. Idly, you begin to toss empty takeaway containers into the empty trash bag you were too afraid to fill in your bedroom. 

After a period of time that doesn’t seem to register in your brain, Kim returns with a slightly melancholic air about him. There is something particularly sad about a man who slept with a whiskey bottle as a teddy bear. Despite this, the pride is still there, tangible, and it makes your heart soar. With defiant steps, he walks past you to the glaring picture on the bookcase and throws that in the bag to join the other. Your lips twitch, wanting to tell him no, but you stop yourself. He needn’t ask. 

“Shall we?” He says, walking back past you and making a sweeping motion with his hand towards the bedroom and you follow like a leaf caught in his breeze. As you walk past, he pats your back assuredly. “We’ve got this.” 

The first evening is simply this, concussed and hobbling cleaning of your bedroom, clearing the space out of old rot so you have somewhere to sleep. It is hard, painfully so, the phantom fingers of pain reaching out through your veins from the wound on your leg and shoulder. Every now and then, Kim sits, perched on the edge of your bed, to gather his dizzy thoughts. 

Something in your mind tells you that he looks good, sat there. He _always_ looks good. 

You open the windows and the tepid, polluted air of Jamrock slowly begins to push out the miasmic air within. You clear the trash, pile the sweat stale clothes, wipe the surfaces, the walls, the floor, remove the bedsheets, decidedly ignoring the stains and the pungent smell of vomit, and put on new ones. You lose track of time, your body settling into an almost comfortable rhythm. You slowly distance yourself from the clutter within. These are not your things anymore, and you can decide whether they will be again. 

Every now and then you look to Kim, a concentrated look on his face. Every now and then, when he is sat on your bed or working adjacent to you, you catch him looking at you. When your eyes meet, he does not look away and wears an expression that could crush a man’s heart. It threatens yours. Unspoken, ‘well done,’ ‘keep at it,’ ‘you’re doing well,’ You feel like you can breathe better when he looks at you like that, veins filling with oxygen, injecting fuel into your blood, flowing with more vigour. 

When he finds a particularly nasty item of clothing or picks up something that has rotting food stuck to its base, you apologise and he stops you. You catch yourself a few more times, biting the words off as they flop from your mouth. He notices and appreciates you trying.  


“You don’t have to apologise. This isn’t you, not anymore, at least. That’s why we’re getting rid of it.” He says, punctuating his final word by tossing another item of clothing in the pile with the rest. 

Time stretches on until the golden light through the window dissipates into the cool blackness of night. The room is silent, the whisper of past regrets and the humming mess now gone, at least in this room. Beyond the walls, you can hear the methodical clunking of your washing machine. Kim looks to you, his hand finding purchase on your shoulder and he squeezes, short and sweet. 

“We did well today. _You_ did well today.” He wants you to know you’re a team, but also that you deserve recognition alone. Something small inside you preens at the attention.  


“Thank you, Kim. Thank you so much, I don’t even want to think about what kind of mess I’d be in right now if you weren’t here. You’re really amazing.” Slathering the praise on thick, like sweet butter on sweeter toast.  


Kim clears his throat, hands finding their way behind his back once more. The Lieutenant is incapable of blushing, but you spot the quiver of his Adam's apple.  


“Don’t deflect the praise onto me - this must have been hard for you. But you did it.”  


Slowly, your gaze drops to the ground. The wood is still warped, but it's clean. You smile, not accepting the praise, but not denying it either. Progress. Kim smiles back. 

You both grab the bags of garbage and you can almost hear it crying at you drag it away, out the door, down the steps and into the alley to throw it into its coffin. It’s final resting place. You have made peace. 

The Lieutenant bids you farewell, wishing you a good sleep and that he expects you to be up early tomorrow to continue your cleaning escapades. You stand on the porch of the apartment block as he gets into his Kineema and it stirs awake, lights blinking like bright eyes as it disappears down the road. 

_In the not so distance, Lieutenant Kim Kitsuragi approaches his home, settling back into a familiar routine. He flicks the lights on, his home breathing clean, cold, and empty. He stands by an open window, a cigarette between his fingers._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> thank you so much for reading, i hope you enjoyed. the more i look at this the more nervous i get and i've pored over this so much it started to mush into one big block of text so if there's anything ridiculous ive put please let me know - constructive criticism is always welcome !


	3. The South Sound

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Harry learns that he doesn't have to hate himself, recovery is hard and, oftentimes, not linear.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> this chapter is quite a bit shorter than the last, im really sorry !

The bullets that punched holes through your flesh and rattled your bones ensure that you will not be fit to work for at least a little while. Kim’s injuries were not as severe and he’s managed to recover from them at a fairly speedy pace, at least outwardly - meaning he returns to work before you. Your apartment is clean now, gutted of all its offal, mostly thanks to the Lieutenant. 

There are still a few things left that tie you to your previous life, twitching with dull knowledge of what they used to mean, but you’ve decided, on your own terms, that you will welcome them back into your new life. 

It still doesn’t feel like home. It feels cold and empty, like a stranger. Although this detachedness is better than the retching sense of dread the previous state of the space gave you. 

Having Kim over every day for the better part of a week felt like having a float beneath your sinking body. But now he can’t be here – he's at work, smoothing over teething pains of a new precinct, getting to know everyone and getting started without you. You lay in your bed with nothing but the smell of detergent, but something still pains you like a loss. Eyelids heavy, you shut your eyes. 

The bright orange lighthouse at the edge of a trash packed, ethanol sea has gone and you’re in new territory now, Harry baby. Kicked out into the water, rudderless and heading towards a storm. You thought you were doing good, oh so good, but that weak little part of your brain is still there, like some sick animal on life support. The way it moves is huge in the waves of your tiny, tiny self. It’s pitiful mewls sound like roars in your sensitive ears. It’s you, it’s all you. You’re fighting yourself, Harry, but which sorry part of your soul will win? 

Time seems to drift away from you. The world around you seems to shift into something blurred – an unrecognisable liminal space. Nothing but your own thoughts and the impersonal smell of washing powder. 

This keeps happening, and you feel like should be concerned. But you’re not. 

Do you think he’s going to come back to you or leave you floating in the grey sea of your own sorrow? There reaches a point where you can’t save some people - when their lungs are already filled and they’re choking up water. Why would he risk being swept away in the current as he wades in to save you when he could simply leave? _Leave_ , Harry, he could just _leave_. 

You can feel your throat close up and your lungs begin to burn. Your body rejects your breath as clammy hands clasp the sheets of your bed, feeling like sand on the beach as you drift away. 

You really are a sorry excuse for a human being. You haven’t had a drink since you woke up at the Whirling, but you’ve certainly thought about it. Pinging about your head, just like how a bottle cap pings off the ground. You keep telling yourself no - but there have been times where you’ve dressed, put on your shoes, grabbed your keys and put on your jacket, like a flimsy shield against the world outside, and prepared to leave, to walk to the nearest shop to collect and drink yourself into oblivion. The guiding light is away, shining elsewhere. Who’s to stop you? Does that really sound like the thought process of someone who’s recovering? It’s only a matter of time before your grip slips, fat sweaty fingers trailing off the edge of the cliff your hanging onto and into the sea of debauchery below. You know they say it feels good when you drown, right before you die? 

You feel tears quivering at the edges of your eyes for the third time this miserable morning, your hands feeling painfully empty as the tears breach. No white knuckles clasped around the neck of a whiskey bottle anymore. You’re a failure. A building, infested with bugs and rot, threatening to collapse in on itself. This moment, this prolonged false moment of recovery is like propping you up with old, rusted scaffolding that’s been used a thousand times before - for projects that have always, always failed. 

You find yourself slipping back into the dark recesses of your mind, lingering there like a corpse floating in the cold, uncaring void. Every time you take a step forward, away from that detached abyss, something within you wrenches you back, eager to keep you in your suffering. 

This sadness has become comfortable. You’re not sure what you’d be without it. 

When you emerged from your alcohol-induced slumber, you were alone. You didn’t know the people who hated you and why. All you had was that lingering sadness. You wandered alone, fumbling with tremoring hands and untrained steps like a toddler in the dark. 

A light shone through and Kim was there, the lighthouse, the beacon, the guiding hand. Even before you really knew him, there was guilt festering inside you at the fact that he was forced to work with you – to follow the toddler in the dark and teach it everything again for the first time. Scold it when it misbehaves, make sure it doesn’t drink the bleach under the sink. As you grew closer, that guilt and that fear grew too, like mold on rotting food. 

You run a clammy hand over your equally clammy face. Your bloated skin has reduced somewhat, the alcohol beneath shrinking away, but the heavy bags beneath your eyes and the wrinkles on your face sit like scars from an old battle. You sit, knees pulled up, head cradled in your hands. Your body flushes hot and cold and you let out a pitiful whine. 

It’s been like this for a while. It’s going to be like this for a lot longer. 

The way your skin rolls and folds into itself makes you uncomfortable. You shift and shift but you can’t settle and your fat, lazy body curls into the sheets, ready to pickle in your sweat and sour thoughts for a few more hours. The loss is still there, painfully prominent, and you know you’re relying on Kim too much but you can’t stop yourself. You know you’ve done it before – grasped with needy hands onto anything, anyone that made you feel good, until the ‘anyone’ slipped away, crumbled into dust under the vice grip of your desperate hands and only the destructive ‘anything’ remained. 

Kim does still visit, as often as he can with work already chasing at his heels. He wants to make sure you’re okay – that you haven't cracked and stumbled away into some twisting abyss. 

Lieutenant Kim Kitsuragi makes his way to your house after his shift, he doesn’t ask beforehand, he knows you’re awake despite the time. As he drives, his eyes instinctively scan over side streets and alleyways, just in case. 

When he visits, you try very hard to pull on some kind of person suit and pretend you’re okay, but he dissects you with his scalpel eyes. It’s in the way your hair mats to your forehead, how your breath smells stale like the food you didn’t eat yesterday, how the sheets on your bed are the same ones you put on when you cleaned the room over a week ago, the pile of washing in front of the machine, the same clothes that were there last time he visited hanging to dry in front of the window. 

It pains him, but you just don’t care enough about yourself. 

Your self-loathing cuts so deep it keeps you awake at night. 

It’s another late night, Kim making another patrol that isn’t mandated by his job, to check in on the crime scene that is you. You’re wearing loose pants and a t-shirt and they smell old. You haven’t changed out of them for a few days. You didn’t even leave your bed today. The bones in your hip and shoulder creak and scream in protest at their sedation, your muscles shrinking and aching as they move. The phantom pain of a bullet rips through you. You flinch. 

“What’s been happening?” 

Kim’s voice startles you so severely, you can almost see the words in front of your face. You’re both sitting on the sofa of your living room, a window open, letting in an icy breeze that prickles your skin. His gloved hand taps his cigarette into an ashtray on the table. He has taken to reserving his one-a-day for when he’s here – when he comes to see you at least. There’s a hushed warmth in the bowels of your chest at the knowledge you’re part of his routine. You hastily extinguish it with the cold of your thoughts. 

You sigh. 

“Nothing. Absolutely nothing at all.” 

Kim takes a long drag on his cigarette, chestnut plumes wafting in the air and curling on your skin like a caress. 

“Yes, that seems to be the problem.” 

A trembling laugh leaves your gaping maw before you can stop it. Kim turns his head slightly to look at you, an eyebrow raised above the rim of his glasses. It’s not there to pin you down, it’s raised in confusion. Your eyes scan your sorry excuse for a home, the word still not quite sitting right, and you can see the glaring signs of your failures slowly accumulating once more. Another shuddering laugh, and you hunch into yourself, baring your back to the world like some hard shell, protecting your soft vulnerabilities. 

Kim’s raised eyebrow pinches along with the other in concern. 

You hate crying. You’ve been doing it so much, but there's so much water in your drowning lungs it needs to get out somehow. So, you let it happen. It’s hopeless. Your body is weak, your mind even weaker. The crushing weight of simply waking up each day and the expectation of existing is overwhelming and you question, every conscious moment, and every unconscious one, whether it is worth it. You’re beginning to think it’s not. 

“Kim, I’m not sure I can do this.” You say after a long moment of quiet sobbing and twitching limbs. There’s a gentle pressure on your arm. The cool leather of Kim’s glove grounds you. He squeezes. The feeling pushes away some of your tremors. 

“You’re already doing it.” The words are said with meaning, conviction, but they clang hollow in your ears. You shake your head. 

“I’m failing. Every night, I can’t sleep. My mind keeps me up with these loud, loud thoughts.” You whip your head up, neck cracking, hands jostling the air in frustration. “They won’t shut up, they never shut up. I hear it during the day, at night, in my dreams when I do get to sleep.” The brief exertion of movement takes it out of you and you slump once more. “They’re telling me I’m not worth it. I believe them. I’m sor-” 

The squeeze to your arm stops you. Kim tilts his head and regards you with an expression, equal parts sorrowful and displeased. 

Oh no, he’s annoyed at you now, look what you’ve gone and done, you’ve wallowed so much in your festering hatred that Kim has slipped in and is being sucked under, he’s going to drown in your sorrow alongside you and that would have been another relationship you’ve killed with- 

“Stop.” 

Your thoughts slam to a halt and you realise you’ve been trembling. Kim’s hand moves away from your arm and you lament the loss of contact. You notice idly that he has knocked the cherry off his cigarette and it sits, smoking faintly, in the ashtray. The hand that once comforted you reaches into his pocket in a calculated move to retrieve a cloth to clean his glasses. His eyes stay very purposefully fixed on the action as he speaks. 

“This is a process. I’m not going to do you the disservice of lying to you and tell you this will be easy - that everything will be okay. Because it won’t. That’s not how the world works and that’s certainly not how addiction and recovery works. You say you’re failing. Unless you’ve been lying to me, you’ve not had a drink since Martinaise. You haven’t been lying to me, have you?” 

You double over in your eagerness to get the words out. 

“No!” 

There’s a flicker of a smile. 

He pauses for a moment and you can almost see him flicking through his mental notes. He carefully puts his glasses back on and looks at you. You immediately feel the tension roll off your shoulders. 

“The world is not an easy place. There are terrible things everywhere and everyone searches for ways to cope. Some fall further down the rabbit hole than others, but everyone indulges in intrusive thoughts of just... Letting go.” The way he says it is like he’s admitting something. You notice, very obviously, how his gaze breaks from yours for a moment. “Thinking about relapsing doesn’t mean you’ve failed. If anything, it means you are stronger for it. You have those thoughts and you have the strength to say no to them.” 

With each word, you feel the heavy fog in your mind dissipate. 

“It’s also the biological effects of withdrawal. Many recovering addicts suffer from anxiety, depression, insomnia, etcetera. You can’t fight your body, no matter how hard you try.” 

His nostrils flare as he inhales deeply and he reaches to pick his cigarette back up, balancing the waning stub between his lips and lighting it once more. No matter how hard you try, you can’t look away. His words flit about your wet brain. His lips clamp around the end of the cigarette and he inhales, eyes still on you. You can hear your thoughts and you can feel his. 

After a time that seems to stretch for eternity, you reluctantly tear your eyes away. 

“Thank you.” 

You pick the skin around your nails and he gently slaps your hand away, his hand coming back a moment later with a cigarette and the lighter in his open palm. You’ve been trying to stop smoking - you hadn’t had one at all during your stint in Martinaise – but with the difficulty of coming back to reality and the pressure of your situation so crushing it threatens to turn your bones to oil, it’s been increasingly more difficult to stop yourself. As with everything else. 

You haven’t got your own – you're only allowed indulge in the sweet chestnut scented sticks proffered between gloved fingers when Kim visits. If he offers. He doesn’t really know, he can’t, but he understands. With a deep breath, you take the cigarette and light it, inhaling the smoke and feeling like a part of Kim is inside you. 

The thought makes you tremble. 

“Thank you. Again. Have I ever told you I’d be a mess without you?” You say with a smile, a sad joke that rings with truth. 

Kim looks at you, the corner of his mouth twitching into a reserved smile in response to your own. 

“You don’t have to tell me. I know.” He quips back but, again, the statement carries a weighted truth. 

The two of you sit in companionable silence, the air stinging your salted cheeks, but the smoky chestnut seems to chase the ill feeling away. It hasn’t been fixed - this perpetual self-hatred and almost desperate need to be proven right, that you are in fact a worthless, awful, disgusting maggot – but it has been settled. The hand of an Innocent, smoothing over the tumultuous sea. Kim’s words seem to lull the loud voices in your head into submission. When he talks, they listen, you listen. There’s something raw, primitive, deep in your limbic system that draws you to every word, every movement. 

Subconsciously, your eyes follow the cigarette that was hanging in the air between fingers to Kim’s lips and you realise you’ve been staring again. If he’s noticed, which he almost certainly has, he doesn’t say anything. Something ignites and you lean back, smoke-filled lungs squeezing as you throw your arm around the back of the sofa and Kim doesn’t shift away. 

It hits eleven when the Lieutenant decides it’s time for him to leave. No words are spoken as you both walk to the door leading outside. The air is cool and it makes your clothes feel grimier, more suffocating. The comfortable silence that proceeded your earlier conversation stretched on for ages, only a few words being uttered meaninglessly now and then, but Kim turns to you before he opens the door to his Kineema. There’s something reflective in his eyes. 

He clears his throat nervously. _Nervously_? Your heart jolts. 

“I’m sorry you felt like you had to build a barrier out of pills and bottles between yourself and the world to in order to face it. But please, learn to let people help you. It will take time and effort to disassemble the fort you’ve made, but when you do, you will see how much the people you care about, care about you too.” 

From behind the walls of your fort, you peer out of a slotted window and see Kim – his ardent expression and hard eyes – and part of it crumbles away. Frantically, you search for words to fill your slack mouth, but nothing comes. 

Don’t say thank you again, he’s just come to you with this profound poetry, a beautiful admission, something that will stay branded on the insides of your sloppy brain for the rest of your life, you’ve thanked him twice already tonight and offered nothing more, please think of something better to say other than another- 

“Thank you.” 

The words come out weak and quiet. You’ve meant it every time you say it to him, but there’s something particularly vulnerable about this one, and not just from your side. Kim gives a short nod. 

“I’ll be over after my shift tomorrow. I can’t give you an exact time but, something tells me you won’t mind.” He says, giving you an amused look. 

You grin, almost sheepishly. Is that a jab at your sleeping habits, or..? 

“It’d be nice to be able to look out your windows. Maybe traverse the kitchen without tripping?” He continues, all sarcasm. A way of asking you to tidy up your dusty shit. You laugh, short and loud and open. Your reaction seems to ease something in his posture. 

“Goodnight, Harry.” And with that, he pulls open the door to his Kineema, the metal seeming to groan in greeting, leaning towards the body within. Good to know the Lieutenant has the same effect on inanimate objects that he has on you. The motor carriage pulls away into the distance and you turn to trek back up to your apartment. You’re afraid of the good feeling in your heart bubbling away with each step you take, now that Kim has gone, but his words are so loud and clear in your mind you could swear he was still here. 

Before you go to bed you change into something clean, take down the days dried clothes in front of the window and shove the pile of clothes in front of the washer inside. 

The next day you wake up before the cusp of noon, you eat breakfast, you stretch your desperate muscles. 

When Kim visits that night, you can read subtle approval on his face and it makes your insides glow.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> once again, thank you so much for reading, i hope you enjoyed ! and, once again, constructive criticism is welcome !


	4. A Light Above Descending

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Harry learns that people do not belong on pedestals.

The days become easier. Not easy, but easier. Sometimes. 

You sit at the edge of your existence - looking out across a dark and dingy sea, waves crashing and suffocating clouds overhead, pelting you with the consequences of your actions as the wind whispers in voices from your past. The air is cold and salty and it stings your skin, your boat is full of holes and you can feel the water creeping up your shoes. The freezing cold seems to take hold of your whole body and you can’t move. You cry and the rain seems to fall harder. 

You panic like you always have and will forever continue to do, ready to throw yourself overboard and accept your fate as another tragedy, forgotten as you sink to the bottom of the sea. 

The angry whispers from the storm above seem to fade away for a moment and you can see a golden ray of sunshine breaching the clouds. Majestic, ethereal, the sight makes your lungs deflate in complete submission at the beauty of it. 

“I’m sorry you had to resort to building a barrier out of pills and bottles between yourself and the world in order to face it-” 

Your boat rocks sharply, suddenly, and the dark, evil sea sloshes over the sides as the water level around you rises. You should be scared, but you aren’t. You don’t panic. This is supposed to happen. 

“But please, learn to let people help you-” 

Your eyes are fixated on the angelic beam ahead and it seems to grow, breathing under your gaze and stretching its golden fingers towards you. 

“, It will take time and effort to disassemble the fort you’ve made-” 

Suddenly, you can feel the chill of the rising water still around your shins. Then slowly, slowly, it begins to recede. Not entirely, you can still feel the pinch of cold in each of your pores, but it rests for now. No longer threatening to creep up and freeze your heart and drag you under. 

“But when you do, you will see how much the people you care about-” 

The sunlight pulsates, like a heartbeat, warm and welcoming. Your feet move without you telling them to and you walk to the edge of your boat, towards it. The boat shifts and wobbles, but you catch it, catch yourself, and keep it steady. Steady enough. The light punches a hole through the suffocating gloom of the sea, bursting out in dappled ripples across the crawling surface. 

Something compels you to turn around. So you do. 

“-care about you too.” 

The words leave Kim’s mouth and it sounds like a hymn. The words are devoid of any tune but it's like music. The world behind him beams, almost blindingly, and his body is cradled in golden sunlight. You breathe in the glowing air until your lungs shine. 

You notice offhandedly that he is standing on the water. Of course he is. 

For a moment that seems to stretch into eternity, you stare at the man before you. The way the light catches across the lenses of his glasses and plays in the darkness of his eyes. The way his hair sits almost perfectly, save a few strands that dance wildly, encouraged by the wind. The way his eyebrows sit poised, schooled into a beautiful, painful expression of concern. The way his shirt is tucked into the neatly fitted top of his trousers, the bottom of those tucked into immaculate boots. And his instantly recognisable bomber jacket that is the sole reason your heart leaps each time you see the colour orange. 

He raises a gloved hand and you inhale the deep smell of smoke and leather. The tips of his fingers brush your cheek, and as soon as they’re there, they’re gone again, wafting you away into the bubbling sea. 

He stays there, hands behind his back, the water swashing about the soles of his boots. 

More time passes, alone in your apartment. It is a battle to drag your heavy limbs from your bed each morning. Sometimes you don’t, but most of the time you do. Progress is slow but tangible. The pile of washing left for days is shrinking, less mess collecting before you work up the energy to clear it. You dress and pace your apartment like a dog, anxiety sick, waiting for your owner to return. 

You’ve said it in passing, quite a few times, that you don’t know where you’d be without Kim right now, but each day that passes, each time he visits you and sits in your living room with his one cigarette in his hand, you feel it pull heavier and heavier at your heart. 

Without Kim, you would be lost. You might even be dead. 

So as the days drag on, your body dragged away like a sandcastle at high tide, you wait obediently for him to come to you and build you up again. 

When the time ticks over to midday and you’re still in bed, you think of Kim and you think how you need to do this. For him. You can’t disappoint him. It drags you out of bed, it forces your hands to scrub dishes, forces food into your belly, forces you to clean, to shower, to dress. Eagerly you listen for the metallic chugging of an engine outside so you can stop desperately clinging onto the thought of the man and bathe in his presence for real. He can hand you the fragments of yourself, instead of the fabrication of him in your mind. 

With each interaction, you find yourself drawn closer and closer. 

“You’ve been doing well.” Kim mentions, in passing, one night as you sit in the comfortable familiarity of your living room sofa at 10.30 pm. He reaches forwards to knock the ash off the tip of his cigarette. You haven’t had one since your breakdown a short while ago. He notices how you stare at the soft glow with intensity, but he doesn’t offer you one. He knows you won’t ask. It’s better that way. With a small smile, you turn to him more fully, an arm folded across the back of the sofa. 

“It’s you. You make me want to try harder.” You don’t realise the intensity those words carry until they’ve left your mouth, bumbling through the air like fat, drunk flies. Something flickers across Kim’s features but you’re too slow to catch it. He meets your gaze and holds it for a second. You can feel the crawl of words in his throat, but he says nothing, simply taking another long, languid drag of his cigarette. You fight the urge to inhale as he exhales. 

You’re painfully aware of how desperate and needy you sound, and you’re almost certain that Kim thinks the same, but you can’t stop the stream of words. 

“You’re the reason I’m keeping myself clean.” 

For a brief moment, your mind flashes back to years and years ago, sat in the same apartment next to a woman with golden locks. The same expectation rests on her delicate shoulders and she stands on the same pedestal, but the weight of your problems is crushing her and, day by day, her beautiful marble body gives way until there is nothing left but dust that retreats into the wind. 

With this admission, he openly sighs and frowns, hunching forwards and leaning his elbows on his knees. Instinctively, he pushes his glasses up with his index finger before meeting your gaze. There’s a mix of sorrow and something close to pity. Not pity exactly, but close enough that it makes you hurt. 

“No, you can’t do this for me, you have to want to do this for yourself. This is internal, you can’t externalise it.” 

He’s gently trying to tell you that you’re a co-dependent mess. 

You wince at the thought and the reaction is familiar to your muscles. You’ve had this conversation and many like it, countless times before with countless different people. Some of the faces you remember – Dora and Jean – and some, you don’t. The fact that this situation rings with such familiarity in your fragmented memories makes a heavy discomfort sit in your chest. You shift, trying to shrug off the feeling. 

Kim’s fingers find the bridge of his nose beneath his glasses and rub, trying to ease his own discomfort away. He fixes you with a gaze and there’s something desperate there. 

“Do you understand?” 

Your Adam's apple trembles and you nod, slowly. The gesture is non-committal, but he seems placated. He returns your nod, equally slow and deliberate, before his attention focuses on his cigarette once more. 

_Arguments, an empty, lonely bed, your quick descent into madness as the person you rested most of your being on slowly disappears under the weight. You blame everything but yourself - how could such a mess possibly be held accountable for their actions? The days drag into weeks and months of the same grey misery and you can feel the body beside you turn into a husk until one day it’s enough. She forces herself down from her pedestal, descending to smite your pitiful self. Why can’t you be responsible for yourself? Why do you have to latch onto the people around you to sustain you like a slimy leech? This is it. That was it. The space around you is cold and you let yourself fall into the dark abyss, phantom fingers in your veins, pumping you with anything and everything to make you forget._

You shudder, violently. 

Don’t. Don’t do this again. If you do this again, the same thing will happen. History repeats itself in patterns, you know. 

You understand but you struggle to grasp the concept. Right now, sitting in the light of the moon next to a man who rivals its glow, you don’t think you ever could. How could you possibly want to do anything for yourself – fat and putrid and rotting from the inside, pointless and ugly – when you could be doing it for Kim. If he asked you to part the sea, you would drown yourself trying, if only to see that smile for half a second before your cold, gasping demise. 

You’re certain this man would take a bullet for you, but you’d do that and anything else in the world, for him. 

Don’t think about that too hard right now – later, when you’re lying in bed unable to settle and sleep before 4 am for the 5th night in a row, is when you should think about it. 

The weight of Kim’s words sit uncomfortably on your shoulders for the duration of his visit and as he gets up to leave and you walk him to the exit, watch his Kineema disappear into the misty folds of the night and return to your apartment, now cold and empty, and drop yourself into the mess of blankets on your bed. 

They remain at the forefront of your mind as, once again, you cannot sleep. 

How could you do this for yourself when everything you do you want to do for him? You want to make him pleased, proud. You want to see him smile and laugh. You know it’s heavy and so, so unfair. Why, now, are you so eager to fill your lungs, to let your heart pump blood through your squeezing veins, purely to see Kim’s face another day? When you were both in Martinaise, you did it mostly for yourself. Well, The Case. More for The Case than yourself, you suddenly realise. Now that’s over, you find yourself scrabbling for something, some reason to keep paddling, and your trembling fingers had found Kim before you even started searching. 

The covers across your body feel suffocating. 

It was about 11.30 pm when Kim left and it's about midnight now. The voices in your head twitch and pulsate, telling you this is something you really, really need to think about, right now. Something you need to think about for a while. Your sore eyes blink a few times. Coupled with the restless buzz of your limbs, you come to accept the fact that you will not be sleeping tonight, and internalise whatever it is your subconscious is crying out for you to listen to. 

An underground. A middle ground. Kim Kitsuragi. 

A man, stoic and composed in the face of everything you’ve experienced together. The first face you saw and trusted when you awoke, afraid and unknowing in a world that should have been familiar. 

You close your eyes and breathe deep, the memories so strong you can smell the salty air of Martinaise. Despite it not being that long ago, it fills you with heady nostalgia. 

You remember, after your first night, standing on the balcony with Kim, glowing in the night lights of the town, going through your case notes. The rise of his eyebrow and how it had you completely and hopelessly at his mercy. Sitting down to play a game of Suzerainty and getting swiftly destroyed - though you loved every second of the casual companionship. The way he struggled to compose himself as you fixated wistfully on the smoker on the balcony. Nodding, unrestrained, dangerously, a silent battle between the two of you, until your neck sprained and Kim claimed yet another victory. Singing karaoke and dedicating it to him and feeling how there should have been a blush on his cheeks. Sitting on the swings together, waiting for the ice to melt away from the corpse of your Motor Carriage, a shared, lilting melody in the air. How he danced with you in the church. How, when you woke up after the Tribunal and looked to him, haloed in the light of your room, you saw him as the guardian angel he is for the first time. 

There’s a tight squeezing in your chest and an aching hollowness, something inside of you is clinging desperately to the memories. You don’t realise you’re sobbing until a tear crawls across your dry lips. 

Something within you cries out, like it’s been shouting into the void of your mind for the longest time and you’re just now paying attention. The realisation comes careening towards you like an out of control Kineema, a brick on the accelerator. 

You’re infatuated with him. You’re infatuated with him because you l- 

_Like_ him. A lot. You like him _so much_. 

There’s a fluttering lightness in your chest, but it sits, shrinking, next to a rapidly growing sense of dread. 

Why. Why have you done this to yourself? It ended so poorly last time. So tragically that you almost killed yourself trying to forget. 

You lick your lips and there’s a fleeting, metallic taste. 

What makes you think that you won’t be affected by this sun’s supernova when it eventually dies out? 

That night, you eventually fall asleep and dream of being in the midst of a torrential storm, looking around frantically for someone you know can’t be there. 

The next day is messy and disorganised, as you try to file away all the scattered thoughts in your brain. There’s a restlessness prickling beneath your skin, almost painfully, since your revelation in the early hours of the morning. You pace and pace and pace until your body screams at you to sit, your healing wounds throbbing. There are so many tangled threads strewn about your head, you try and stab them and twist them all together but you’re shaky and slippery and no matter how hard you try it seems to keep falling apart. 

Everything is laid out so clearly on your plate - it could not be clearer - but you don’t want to swallow what's there, scared of the bitter taste. 

As you wander the enclosed space, you seem to subconsciously end up at the phone in your hallway. You twiddle your fingers. There’s a small piece of paper peeking out from beneath the corner of the phone. You can feel it. You can hear it. It’s rustling and calling to you and it smells like chestnut. Your fingers twitch over the paper and with the man that usually stops your impulsive urges so easily accessible on the other end of the phone, it's helpless to try and stop yourself. You grab the paper and look at it. Kim’s neat handwriting is there, reciting the Precinct’s telephone number in case you forget (or if you have an emergency, Kim didn’t say that but you know he meant that too). As if you’re stalling something, you pinch the edges of the paper and run your fingers across it. You check the time. 4.24 pm. Kim will be working right now. 

Kim _will_ be working right now, so why is your hand reaching towards the phone, why are you picking it up, why are you pressing the numbers? Stop, stop now- 

You hear a breath at the other end of the line, but before he can greet you, you eagerly jump in first. 

“Hey, Jules! It’s Harry, I was wondering if Kim was there? Just wanna talk to him real quick. About work. Work stuff. Y’know how work is.” 

Word vomit some more, that’ll make it better. 

“Work.” 

“...Yes, Harry, of course. One moment, please.” 

At the mention of your name, you hear the familiar ruckus in the background – some kind of joke, judging by the uproar of laughter, but you’re too displaced to really notice. There’s some more ambient noise, shuffling and then- 

“Harry? What’s going on, are you okay?” His voice is laced with quiet surprise and concern. It makes your heart hurt. He’s expecting there to be something wrong. 

Of course he is, what other reasonable explanation is there as to why you would be calling him now? 

“Hey, Kim! What’s up? Nothing’s wrong, I uh, just had to call you. I... wanted to talk.” 

With each word that passes your lips, you wince further and further into yourself, acutely aware of how ridiculous you’re being. There’s a long pause. 

_Precinct 41 is crowded with bodies and voices, the atmosphere thick and heavy with smoke. Whisps trail up into the air as Communications Officer Jules Pidieu exhales after a long drag of his cigarette. His old skin sags wearily under the toil of work. Lieutenant Kim Kitsuragi, near freshly transferred, stands beside him, radio pressed to his ear. There are bags around his eyes and they almost visibly darken. He is exhausted. He breathes in the toxic air and contemplates having his one-a-day now._

“I’m working.” His tone is clipped. 

“I um. I know. I’m sorry.” 

He doesn’t stop you from saying that apology. You _should_ be apologising. 

“There’s nothing wrong?” 

“Well... No?” 

There’s another pause and you can hear Kim sigh. 

“Why did you call the Precinct and ask for me then? When I’m working? If nothing is wrong?” 

You suck your teeth and think, think, think, desperately trying to pull something miraculous out of your brain. The only thing that springs to the forefront of your mind is to tell him you miss him. You do not say that. The silence stretches on for too long and Kim must be able to hear your brain desperately scrambling around your head-case and he decides to put you out of your misery. 

“I’ll be over later.” 

Leaving no time for you to respond, he kills the line. 

The next six hours are hellish. You feel like you’re swinging back on a chair, balancing on the precipice, right on the cusp of slipping and plummeting to the ground. Your heart rattles in your chest as you try desperately to keep yourself busy. Each time you look out of the window and see that the sun has dipped a bit lower, or look at the clock and see another ten minutes have passed, you feel the most overwhelming sense of sickly anticipation. 

Eventually, you hear the low, mechanical purr of an engine in the distance. It seems to take an age to get outside your home and you listen for the sound of the metal door closing, boots on the pavement, the creak of the first door to your apartment building, before you run over to open yours. Kim's fist falls limply in the air as the door it was about to knock against disappears. He raises an eyebrow and peers up at you. 

“Kim, I’m so sorry,” You say frantically as you move to the side, letting the man enter. He does, his hands immediately fishing around his jacket pockets for his cigarettes. He saved it for now, he knew he’d need it. 

“, I haven’t been sleeping and my brain has been such a mess recently. There’s so many confusing things up there right now, I didn’t know what to do,” Your words come tumbling out and there’s little you can do to stop them. He continues walking away from you, cigarette perched delicately between his lips as he ignites the end, immediately taking a large lungful. 

“, The only thing I could think to do was call you, you always make me feel steady and you know exactly what to say and-” 

Suddenly, Kim snaps his head towards you and the lenses of his glasses seem to flash in the light like some kind of silent warning. It looks like lightning-bolts striking across his eyes. Both eyebrows are drawn into a stern glare and you recoil, electrified. 

“Stop. I can’t do this right now.” He says, his tone cool and level, despite his intense expression. 

You blink a few times. You’re not sure what you were expecting, but you don’t think it was that. It’s a lot better than what you could have expected, honestly – a lot better than the reaction you deserved. You look at Kim, really look at him, managing to take off your infatuation tinted glasses, for a long moment. What you see makes your heart wither. He looks so, so unbelievably tired. 

There are bags under his eyes so deep and heavy they rival your own. His eyes look dull and bloodshot. He looks worn. 

A wave of guilt crashes into you with such force it threatens to knock you off your feet. You’ve been so selfish, so focussed on your own suffering. You looked at Kim and saw a stalwart angel – an immovable force, so composed, so rigid and assured. He is beautiful, wondrous, and amazing, but he is also just a man. You cannot place the weight of your whole life on someone else's shoulders when they already have the weight of their own. 

The realisation makes your whole body deflate and you muster the softest, most earnest expression you can manage. 

“Kim, I...” You flex your fingers experimentally before raising your hand and letting it rest against Kim’s arm, feather-light. You don’t push him or pull him, there is no overt dictation, just a short, gentle touch as you make your way to the sofa and sit. Your eyes are still fixated on his face and something seems to have softened. 

“... How was work?” 

You don’t ask him, “How are you?” because you know he won’t answer that. You ask him something gentle, unassuming, easing him away from his troubles slowly. 

With a conceding sigh, he follows you and sits, tapping the large mound of ash that has accumulated at the end of his cigarette. 

“Stressful.” He says, simply. 

“Teething problems?” 

“You could say that. It’s hard right now, working without a partner.” He says, drawing his eyes away from ahead of him to look at you. 

You are leant forward, elbows on your knees, body angled towards him as much as it can be. Nothing else matters right now apart from easing the tension away from Kim’s mind. 

He notices your body language, your eagerness, and appreciates it. There’s a flutter of a smile. 

“Don’t worry, I’ll be back to save the day before you know it.” You say and almost cringe at your words but the puff of a laugh from Kim’s nose stops it. Slowly, his amusement turns into something more plaintive. He rolls the words around his mouth for a bit, tasting them, testing them, before he speaks. 

“I haven’t been sleeping very well either.” He admits. You shift a bit closer, one leg raising up to fold beneath you on the sofa so you can turn to face him completely now. 

“No offense but, I could tell.” 

Kim cocks his head amusedly, his eyebrow following suit, and takes another drag. He makes a show of exhaling chestnut plumes into your face. Slowly. Discreetly. Almost like he didn’t mean to - but he did. 

“What’s that supposed to mean?” 

You laugh quietly, shaking your head slightly before looking at him again. You let the silence drag for a moment, the amusement disappearing from your voice when you continue. 

“You look... You look tired, Kim. Really tired. Have you been eating properly?” 

Kim reclines his head slightly in surprise and coughs, an undignified sound. He didn’t entirely expect to be called out. 

“Not particularly well - I’ve been preoccupied. There’s...” He pauses, looking you over and weighing something up before continuing. “There’s been a lot on my plate recently.” 

Ah. There it is. The beginning of the slippery slope into the abyss, where you both tumble in together, embracing but at each other's throats. So much for growth, so much for- 

“Not that I mind having a full plate - it keeps me busy. I try not to let things get on top of me but,” He inhales, deeply. “, it’s been getting too close to overflowing.” 

It’s like someone has flicked a switch within you. Seeing Kim like this, weak and tired, breaks something inside of you. 

You need to recover, for yourself - to become the person you feel you should be. That motivator has been eluding you – dragging you down the messy path of almost complete dependence but... Helping people is your job, your life, it gives you meaning and if you can't do that, who are you really? You try for Kim, of course. You care about him and you want to make him proud but a larger, louder part of yourself wants to step forward towards a destination you want to reach. 

You cannot place the weight of your life on someone else's shoulders when they already have the weight of their own. You can, however, share it. 

Perhaps a little too tenderly, you place your hand on Kim’s bare forearm. Something prickles across your skin and you swear you see him twitch. 

“I’m here for you. I’ll help you any way I can.” 

The way he doesn’t even fight the smile on his face makes you feel like your heart has burst a thousand times over. 

You both sit in your apartment, on the sofa, in the pale gaze of the moon, and Kim talks to you, earnestly. There are a few times he pauses, makes to reconsider and cleans his glasses more than necessary to avoid meeting your gaze, but he talks. You know this isn’t something that comes all too naturally to him – being vulnerable isn’t something remotely on his radar, but he trusts you. Really and truly. 

When it ticks over to midnight and Kim makes to leave, you both linger at the door far longer than necessary. It’s already later than the usual time he leaves and you’re especially concerned given his poor sleeping habits recently, but you can’t seem to usher him out and he doesn’t seem to want you to either. The distance between you suddenly feels very small. 

“Thank you.” He says, after a while. His breathing is measured, you can tell he’s having to make a concerted effort to control it. So are you. He licks his lips, so quickly it’s barely noticeable, but you manage to catch it, eyes darting down to settle on the wet glistening of saliva on his bottom lip. As if caught in a siren’s song, you take a small step forwards without even realising. Your eyes meet once more and something between you ignites, intangible, but world-changing. There's an intense look in his eyes. 

"Not yet." It seems to say. "You still need time." 

“Goodnight, Harry.” He says before he turns to leave. The way your name sounds coming from his mouth in this moment makes your entire body prickle. 

“Sleep well.” You reply, a smile on your face. Something in you aches, yearning desperately, but he’s right. He’s always right. 

The way your breaths kissed between you was enough. 

The next day, Kim comes to visit you after work and you make sure to ask him how he is as soon as he steps through the door. You sit with him and listen – about how much paperwork there is, how his pen ran out of ink midway through a report and he had to use an awful cheap replacement, how he’s looking forward to your return and working beside you again. You check if he’s eaten, (he hasn’t), and you feed him. 

You dream of the sea again, roiling and turbulent, but this time you relish it. You don’t lament the loss of the angel - now he is beside you as a man. You hold the oars together and slowly row through the waves. You talk and share your burdens, shoulder to shoulder.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> (also that he likes kim a lot)  
> so many metaphors.... im so sorry i just jam pack my writing with metaphors, i can't help it... the interactions have been kind of minimal and we've been inside harry's head a lot but next chapter will have a lot more interaction, i promise ! thank you for reading as always, hope you enjoy, feedback is welcome !


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